Feb 9, 2024 02:31 AM
(This post was last modified: Feb 9, 2024 02:33 AM by C C.)
Review mills identified as a new form of peer-review fraud
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/revi...88.article
INTRO: A ‘review mill’ that appears to have produced at least 85 similar peer-review reports featuring coercive citation could be an indicator of a new organised form of academic malpractice. The review reports were discovered alongside articles published across several journals run by the open-access publisher, MDPI, and were brought to light by a volunteer-led investigation posted online by Predatory Reports – an organisation that aims to highlight unethical publishing practices.
The work was carried out by María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, a professor of business management and marketing at the University of Seville, Spain, who started investigating after reading a suspect review report published alongside an article in MDPI’s Journal of Clinical Medicine. The report stated that the authors ‘should cite recently published articles such as …’ and then provided two digital object identifiers (DOIs) corresponding to articles that the reviewer themselves had co-authored... (MORE - details)
The menace of wellness influencers
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-men...fluencers/
INTRO: Some in the mainstream media are just waking up to a phenomenon we have been warning about for years – misinformation, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and lax regulations have negative impacts on society that go far beyond whatever the original topic at hand. We sometimes refer to this as “quack magnetism” – the tendency of people and institutions who buy into one conspiracy or pseudoscience to promote many, or even all, of them.
CNN, for example, has noticed that popular wellness influencers are engaging in climate change denial. This may seem puzzling at first, but for regular contributors and readers here the response is, of course they are. Mercola, for example, wrote about the Maui fires with the caption “What the media won’t tell you.” He speculates (he’s just asking questions, right) that the fires are part of a government conspiracy to grab land to create a smart city. Truth_crunchy_mama, meanwhile, told her followers, “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.”
There are a couple of ways, I think, to best understand this phenomenon. One layer is the trap of conspiracy thinking. A conspiracy is the “get out of jail free” card for pseudoscience and sloppy thinking... (MORE - details)
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/revi...88.article
INTRO: A ‘review mill’ that appears to have produced at least 85 similar peer-review reports featuring coercive citation could be an indicator of a new organised form of academic malpractice. The review reports were discovered alongside articles published across several journals run by the open-access publisher, MDPI, and were brought to light by a volunteer-led investigation posted online by Predatory Reports – an organisation that aims to highlight unethical publishing practices.
The work was carried out by María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, a professor of business management and marketing at the University of Seville, Spain, who started investigating after reading a suspect review report published alongside an article in MDPI’s Journal of Clinical Medicine. The report stated that the authors ‘should cite recently published articles such as …’ and then provided two digital object identifiers (DOIs) corresponding to articles that the reviewer themselves had co-authored... (MORE - details)
The menace of wellness influencers
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-men...fluencers/
INTRO: Some in the mainstream media are just waking up to a phenomenon we have been warning about for years – misinformation, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and lax regulations have negative impacts on society that go far beyond whatever the original topic at hand. We sometimes refer to this as “quack magnetism” – the tendency of people and institutions who buy into one conspiracy or pseudoscience to promote many, or even all, of them.
CNN, for example, has noticed that popular wellness influencers are engaging in climate change denial. This may seem puzzling at first, but for regular contributors and readers here the response is, of course they are. Mercola, for example, wrote about the Maui fires with the caption “What the media won’t tell you.” He speculates (he’s just asking questions, right) that the fires are part of a government conspiracy to grab land to create a smart city. Truth_crunchy_mama, meanwhile, told her followers, “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.”
There are a couple of ways, I think, to best understand this phenomenon. One layer is the trap of conspiracy thinking. A conspiracy is the “get out of jail free” card for pseudoscience and sloppy thinking... (MORE - details)